JP Morgan's Losses: "No Big Deal"

Wall Street and its Congressional and Fox news allies continue to play down the trading losses of JP Morgan Chase for gambling wildly on bad credit derivatives in May, as though they were quite small and normal, and should not be a reason for enforcing the regulation laws passed two years ago. Larry Fink, of Blackrock is only the most recent person to come to their defense saying on CNBC’s “Squack Box” on Thursday that the loss, which he said was only $2 billion, was “no big thing.”

However, by the time he said that, the losses had already risen to $5 billion and he knew that. Also, as soon as the losses came out, JP Morgan’s stock price also fell by around another #30 billion. So, all tolled, the loss of the bad and foolish and risky gambling action cost them between $30 to 35 billion. And surely someone in the very the smart people at JPM must have known that if they lose $5 billion, they will lose even more than that in investor confidence. Surely they knew that.

JP Morgan’s profits last year were in the neighborhood of $90 billion, so the tiny, no big deal loss was one third of their income. That is a VERY big deal.